Level the playing field

re: "Trans women banned from female athletics" (BP, March 24, 2023) 

Dear editor,

The unhappy decision by World Athletics that "transgender women will no longer be allowed to compete in female track and field events regardless of their levels of testosterone" again confirms that common sense is indeed common, typically meaning crudely populist, and not particularly sensible. 

There was a much better solution to this contentious sporting issue borne of improving technology and respect for individuals. World Athletics has squandered that opportunity. Instead of perpetuating the ancient obsession with biological sex, the focus could instead have been put on relevant physical criteria, such as the cited testosterone levels, and allow athletes to compete in categories according to which set of those relevant physical criteria they met, irrespective of genetic sex. How could that be unfair to anyone competing in such a category? This solution to it would have defused the controversy without perpetuating inherited notions that focus on judging women differently to men merely because they are biologically women.

In what other area of human contest is such sex-based discrimination still an accepted norm? Are women managers kept carefully sequestered from male managers, or do both compete in the corporate field on the same set of relevant criteria, with their sex being irrelevant? Are women doctors, and now transgender doctors, kept from competing on equal terms with doctors born male, or are they judged according to their competence as doctors, with sex properly deemed irrelevant?

The sensible resolution to the new biological and social realities made increasingly common is to get over separating humans according to whether they have a Y-chromosome or not and instead judge each individual according to actually relevant criteria. In the case of athletics, those criteria would include things like testosterone level, height, weight, lung capacity, and so on. Why, after all, should weaker women be forced to compete against stronger women merely because they happen to be in the category of biological female?  

When other playing fields are moving past it, why does sport remain determined to discriminate on the basis of sex? Why the refusal to treat individuals impartially according to relevant criteria for ability? 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on March 26, 2023, under the title "Level the playing field" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2536289/level-the-playing-field